The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm.

While we open with dazed individuals in a crashed limousine as it begins to take on water, Submerged’s frequent flashbacks eventually reveal a tiresome crime plot rife with soporific acting and unremarkable dialogue.

There's something about this film's churn of goo and grit that lingers ambivalently, difficult to digest.

The furrowed-brow seriousness of X-Men is its least attractive quality, but that is the mood that dominates in this film. It's hard to see how anyone other than hardcore fans will find much to entertain them.

It’s no-frills, B-movie modesty might have been winning, if it weren’t so dashed-off.

The kids are charmless, the adults bemused.

Why drag the franchise back now? The screamingly obvious answer is sheer cash-grab cynicism. Or perhaps it’s to cater to the generation of kids who’ve grown up riding the Saw-themed roller coaster at Thorpe Park. Either way, it’s depressing.

Director Niels Arden Orpev was in charge of the original "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Rapace, but fails to create a revenge thriller with anything like the same focus.

If all the money in the world is no guarantee of a good story, all the technical innovations – the dressing of sets, the creation of effects, the careful management of what is in and out of the frame – is of course no guarantee of one either.

It is bloated with all the artist cliches, but freighted with mind-blowing dullness and joylessness.

Cox's guardedly avuncular turn might have sustained a more rigorous endeavour, but the attempt to evoke the trauma of the Munich air disaster is rendered wholly insupportable by the trifling hooey around it.

What’s ultimately frustrating about Zipper is that it seems like it has something important to say about infidelity and the sex industry, but can’t decide what that should be.

The streak of perversity at Intrusion’s centre nudges it above the norm, briefly waking us up before we sleepily click on something else.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

The script works efficiently and everyone involved sells it hard; there are continuous closeup cutaways to that cute and gurgling baby who never cries no matter what happens. But the sheer robotic sheen of the film in the end works against it.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

Subtle it isn't. But the entertainment rev counter more or less keeps turning over.

I have to admit to being helplessly enchanted – or suckered – for the most part. There’s wit here and The Nutcracker will take you from zero to Christmas jumper in the opening sequence. What’s missing is the melancholy darkness of ETA Hoffmann’s story. Instead, schmaltz-merchant director Lasse Hallström tugs at the heartstrings and ladles on the syrup.

Given the calibre of the voice cast, perhaps the biggest disappointment is how humourless the movie is.

It’s a play shoehorned into a film. Sometimes that can work – LaBute’s managed it before – but it’s a steep hill to climb, and this one doesn’t quite make it.

It's quite a sweet idea, with a liberal attempt at balance, though Palestinian audiences may query the idea of making their half of this equation a child, and Fahed's motivation for defying his elders in quite so disloyal and dangerous a way, is never convincingly explained.

It is grown-up, respectable and historical, perfectly competently made, lots of accents and period dressing-up … and just the tiniest bit dull.

[Farrelly's] latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.

Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.

For a film about living, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavour.

There is an undeniable energy and spookiness to this low-budget chiller, which makes intelligently modest use of digital FX in a way that some bigger-budget projections would do well to emulate.

This film is covered in a thick ectoplasm of disappointment.

Like with his Halloween reinvention, the film is trapped between the serious and the silly, a thinly etched tale of a father dealing with grief and faith jarring next to scenes of a demonic child screaming the C-word while spitting slime. It’s better when it leans into the latter, a schlocky night out at the movies made with more competence than most recent horrors but one that is unlikely to make a believer out of die-hard fans.

The pieces of a potential franchise are put in play here without stakes being raised or pulses quickened.

The film is constantly defining what ugly is: freckles, crooked teeth, excess weight, glasses, clumsiness. At times it feels like an unintentional crib sheet for under-sevens bullying.

There are some interestingly contrived moments of claustrophobia and surreal lunacy, but this cliched and slightly hand-me-down script neither scares nor amuses very satisfyingly.

Crispian Mills directs with zip, throwing things together with a breathlessness that largely distracts from the fact that, for a horror-comedy, Slaughterhouse Rulez is neither particularly scary nor especially funny. But it does have an amiable sort of charm.

Over-the-top it may be, but Love’s film-making has an attacking force that some of the more respectable Brit films are lacking.

The Other Woman scrawls out a dumb dumb-feminist message with a big, fat marker pen.

The humour feels as if it is pitched at kids rather than adults, and for me Johnny English’s wacky misadventures aren’t as inventive and focused as Atkinson’s silent-movie gags in the persona of Bean.

Ella McCay is, first and foremost, a mess – a clunky collection of incoherent characters and confounding plot that seem to defy basic story logic at every turn, and not in a surprising or intriguing way.

Christmas With You could hardly be a more generic title, and the 90-minute bundle of anodyne cheer lives up to its vanilla promise.

Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there’s an edginess to Spielberg’s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.

Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It’s the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.

In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.

Considering this is the first biopic of one of the world’s most beloved athletes, it’s too bad such a predictable and ham-fisted kids’ flick was the goal.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

The Intruder isn’t bringing much that’s new to the table but what it does, it does well, and there’s something to admire about its stark efficiency, dragging us along with full force, even if we know exactly where we’re going.

It’s a slight cut above just how very bad these things can get, but not enough to edge it toward something that would deserve your full attention. So errand away, Mother of the Bride will be just fine playing in the background.

It’s all boringly plain sailing until it suddenly isn’t and the film takes a turn from romcom into something more dramatic.

There won’t be many viewers who’ll remember it by this time next month but within its swift running time, it just about fits the brief, zipping along at speed buoyed by the charm of its leads, like almost guaranteed instead.

It has risibly cliched dialogue and wooden, poorly directed acting from a B-to-G list cast, but it appears to be shot in one continuous take and strictly as an example of choreography and technical skill it’s pretty nifty.

The movie falls apart with some moral handwringing that will likely infuriate genre fans, and for everyone else, feel like a tired airing of the debate around violence in movies – all the more objectionable in a film with its fair share of mutilated female victims.

What makes the film most successful are the four performers. The standout is Baker (better known as rapper Machine Gun Kelly) who plays Tommy Lee with both a sweet naivety and an insidious mischievousness that make some of the darker moments sneak up on you without feeling unearned.

Do you want to laugh already? Then laugh now, before you see this dispiritingly unfunny pirate movie. Later, it's difficult. Very brief moments only, I'm afraid. [25 Sep 1983, p.19]

The cast nurdle matters along to the climactic real ale awards, which becomes the scene of current cinema’s least surprising surprise result.

The film is competently crafted, dutifully acted, clearly labored over with soul, and yet, like its star, lacks a beating heart.

There’s a cinematic slickness to the film (it was intended to be released theatrically until the pandemic) that separates it from its more noticeably shoddier fright night competitors but it’s mostly a familiar, if not entirely fruitless, trudge down a well-trodden path, one that takes us into, at times, questionable territory.

The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.

Without firm grounding in reality, Him can only skid, hopelessly, into the realm of kabuki theater and make a muddle of its football critique.

It’s another of Wahlberg’s collaborations with director Peter Berg, but without the style of their other films.

There’s something to be admired about a film that can gracefully defy simple genre categorization but Submergence feels like a clumsy melange, a confused adaptation made by people who don’t seem quite sure what they have on their hands.

Entourage is like an enthusiastic puppy, slightly tipsy on beer, humping on a stripper’s leg, but desperate to please nonetheless. It is a film designed to be liked – which makes it hard to hate.

Salvation was boring, but Genisys makes you sad. Risk-averse Hollywood has made a crash-test dummy of a once great franchise, simply throwing everything at it to see what it stands.

Dead in a Week is striving for a weirdly sentimental kind of black-comic farce, and it doesn’t work.

The digital novelty is striking for the first 10 minutes, silly for the next 10 minutes, and by the end of the movie you’re pining for the analogue values of script and direction.

The Green Inferno will be gleefully offensive and unpalatable to mainstream audiences, who may be more similar to The Green Inferno’s victims than they’d like to think. No one could accuse Roth of lacking guts – even if he hasn’t found the perfect recipe for them.

It takes work to make Murphy entirely unfunny, and this film manages the job one-handed.

It’s time to wave the neuralyzer in the face of every executive involved and murmur softly: forget about this franchise.

There’s no way around this: The November Man is asinine. It is not without its pleasures – if you like seeing people get hit in the face with shovels, that is – but it might be the most irresponsibly dumb spy thriller I’ve seen in some time.

The film is, of course, very silly, but diverting and ingenious, and contains game performances from Wahlberg, Dockery and Grace.

Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.

This effort is similarly infuriating and entertaining by turns, and features pretty good performances from a handful of up-and-coming young male actors, including Brenton Thwaites and Kyle Gallner, along with lovable old ham Billy Zane putting in a last-act cameo.

It’s a film that should have been a major disaster but ends up being just a minor one instead, watchable enough in parts, with the lowest of expectations, but not enough to warrant the time and money that’s been funnelled into it.

Mark Waters wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script, but the whole feels tamely conventional: misanthropy passed through the usual Hollywood motions.

Loud and zappy, The Jungle Bunch trots out predictable be-kind-be-brave platitudes, but lacks anything distinctive of its own.

Put bluntly, Tim Story's film wears you down until you relent and say, yes, I like these people and it's fun to watch them all have such a good time.

The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.

So bogged down by form, Franco fails to get his head up enough to think about content.

Kinda Pregnant finds its groove in the more grounded and honest. The tiptoeing around big changes in one’s best friendship, the tension between joy and dread, the role of a friend when another is going through something irrevocable all get mentions that hint at something sharper and stickier. But what texture exists gets steamrolled by the loud and extreme.

Enjoyable, with some funny lines.

Odd zingers and residual eccentricities (a Whit Stillman cameo, anyone?) stand as traces of the blast it might have been, but this cast surely signed on in anticipation of many more laughs than there are in the final cut.

This is like an over-chewed piece of gum: flavourless.

Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.

Nothing can distract us from a script that just doesn’t work, family dynamics we don’t believe, jokes we don’t laugh at and characters we don’t care about. Oh. What. Fun. is anything but.

Embarrassing for everyone involved not because of any squeamish subject matter – quite the contrary, seeing retirement-age characters are refreshing – but because the story structure is so fake and so plodding.

Under Callaham’s inelegant pen, the characters all speak in this overexcited 13-year-old’s vernacular, prone to F-bombs and dick-talk.

Third Person is a work of staggering trash; an ensemble drama with the aesthetic of an in-flight magazine, but less classy writing.

A huge improvement on the muddled melodrama of Labor Day, Men, Women and Children is still a flawed Jason Reitman film. Its scope is too big, his ambitions too high.

Thanks to the sorry state of the action comedy genre as is, Role Play isn’t a total loss but it’s still much too far from a win.

Surprisingly, many of Bekmambetov’s updates work well.

A dead-eyed Chris Pratt presides over this convoluted mess of Bond-style villains and toothless action that even the original cast can’t save from extinction.

Ping-ponging camera moves temporarily distract from the haphazard structuring and translation.

It’s hard to escape the sinking feeling that this is a waste of talent – and that this is a good-natured, well-meaning but pointless kind of Brit-comedy ancestor worship, paying elaborate homage to a TV show that got it right the first time.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

There are, indeed, some sparks in this movie. The Vikander/DeHaan romance is a dud no matter how well it’s lit, but the “downstairs” passion between Grainger and O’Connell has a degree of realism and eroticism.

A surprisingly nimble summer comedy that finds both Aniston and Sandler at their most charming.

This is a well-meant story of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with some help from his grandma. But it feels contrived and self-conscious.

This dorky, silly sci-fi feature offers a weird blend of high-grade craftsmanship (especially from the visual effects, cinematography and music departments), and guileless ineptitude, especially in the crucial realms of screenwriting, acting and editing.

An incredibly provocative piece of work, featuring a brave and vulnerable performance by Naomi Watts (who seems perhaps a little too young) and a career-high acting masterclass from Robin Wright (who is cast perfectly).

As charmless as its predecessor, The Addams Family 2 is without an iota of ooky, nor any shred of kooky. Really, it’s just kind of ghastly – and not in the intended way.

Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall.

Without the franchise pull behind it, Next of Kin is a rather anonymous horror of demonic possession, competently made and with decent acting but indistinguishable from the pack, where predictability wins over personality.